The latest information and perspectives on Oracle Enterprise Manager

Monday Jun 23, 2014

Patching has always been one of the many joys (or dreads) of Oracle DBAs. The effort compounds as the Database sprawl grows and the architecture complexity increases. Additionally, there is an increasing pressure to patch the systems with minimal or zero downtime. EM12c's Database patch automation functionality provides an end-to-end management starting with proactive patch recommendations (like quarterly PSUs and CPUs), complete pre-flight checker to ensure predictable patching during maintenance window and automation for patching the comprehensive list of products under the Oracle Database family. (EM12c Patch Automation overview

Patching has always been one of the many joys (or dreads) of Oracle DBAs. The effort compounds as the Database sprawl grows and the architecture complexity increases. Additionally, there is an increasing pressure to patch the systems with minimal or zero downtime.

With the introduction of "Out of Place" patching in EM12c, the automation feature got a complete overhaul. Over the past 3 years I have seen customers moving to this mode to achieve their automation goals. (What is Out of Place?)

Patching Data guard environments (read as Primary and its corresponding Standby Databases) has always been a challenging task for the DBAs. In addition to handling the differences in steps needed for the configuration, the very nature of its distributed environment and incorporating any additional custom tasks makes it more demanding.Till now in EM we only supported automation in disparate steps and in “In Place” mode.

Starting 12.1.0.4 (EM12c R4), the support is enhanced to be more tighter, can be done in 'Out of Place' mode, and has new supplemental features to manage the process along with its additional tasks.

In this post we will take a closer look of the data guard stand by patching feature and then dive into a use case, you could try out in your environment.